Where all stories are one-sided

The website www.postsecret.com is part art exhibit and part nondenominational confessional where strangers show and tell their deepest, darkest secrets. Explains the site’s mission statement, “PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.”

Postcard and secret collector Frank Warren, 41, a self-described “husband, father and small businessman” from Germantown, Md., launched the site in 2004 as an electronic counterpart to an art exhibit, in which he distributed 3,000 self-addressed postcards that asked people to tell him something they’d never told anyone before.

Those first cards were displayed in the art show -- but the mail kept coming long after the exhibit ended. So he posted the subsequent secrets online to share the dirty laundry with the rest of the world.

Warren has received about 20,000 postcards through snail mail (e-mailed cards aren’t accepted) and uploads the latest arrivals on Sundays. The site doesn’t link to the archives of older material because he says he likes the “immediacy of living secrets.”

The messages run the gamut of human emotion. Some are humorous -- “Sometimes I let my children eat Cheese Puffs for breakfast!” -- and other cards are thought-provoking, even heart-wrenching. One message placed over a pair of suitcases reads: “I’d planned what I’d take with me. When the time was right, I knew exactly what to pack. While my bruises healed ...” And another matter-of-factly states, “Everyone who knew me before 9-11 thinks I’m dead.”

Sharing secrets has garnered a lot of attention for Warren. Some of the postcards are featured in his new 288-page hardcover book, “PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions From Ordinary Lives”; the All-American Rejects used the postcards in their video for the song “Dirty Little Secret”; and other cards have been exhibited in several galleries and museums on the East Coast. This summer, Warren’s cards will have a four-month show at the Reading (Pa.) Public Museum.

Who knew -- besides the guys at Enron -- that spilling secrets could be so profitable?

-- Christine N. Ziemba